After a lot of internal discussion... we are going to delay the launch of new lands until after players have had some time to get comfortable with the new systems we are introducing. This means we are delaying launch of new lands until mid May (possibly longer). Between now and then we'll be releasing new features and making some improvements to the overall game balance. Please continue to post your ideas and feedback to the forums. We thank the community for the vociferous and passionate feedback.

Also, Charlie wanted me to include something about the changes being really exciting... so you should also note that the changes are going to be 'cool/fun/exciting'.

Our goal with this post is to keep everyone up to date on things we are working on, get everyone excited, and gain early feedback on things not yet released.

For this post:

Underpromise and overdeliver

We have limited resources so we need to put them into the highest impact features and improvement.

Because of that some things mentioned will likely not make it in the game. Also keep in mind that priorities can change, some things just don’t work in application, or we learn that a feature doesn’t measure up to our standards. Thanks in advance for your understanding! It lets us have much more candid and open collaboration.

Let's get into it!

Overview

We took all your suggestions and broke them down into the following categories:

Monthly ContentEconomyClanWarsOverall game balance (off system wars)Quality of LifeAbuse

Monthly Content

All things related to events, promotions, temporary epic battles, basically things that are changing or updated each week or month.

We have been working on a new feature behind the scenes that will help address monthly content and give us more flexibility with events! We’re fairly close to completion, and hope to get this out soon.

The feature is currently called ‘Legends’. The Legends feature will allow us to both personalize and incentivize more actions in game to create compelling and diverse ways of playing the game. It will feel very similar to what you would think of as quests in a typical MMO ie: being tasked to complete something to receive a reward.

With our current system, we have worked to keep content fresh for years, but sometimes being bottle-necked by creative and technical aspects of event implementation.

This new system should address many of these concerns and provide for more interesting events. We’re excited to get it out it and see all the things we can come up with together!

Finally, we recognize that the rewards for monthly content need some improvement so we are working on a feature to add more valuable items worth grinding for.

Economy

This section we grouped in ideas related to the long-term health of the economy of Kingdoms at War. There are pain points here on inflation, ally market, building releases, as well as creative ideas like Bounty Lists.

Currently related to this category, we are working on two main things: Building Tokens + New land release, and a design to inject more allies into the game.

New lands and buildings will be coming out, we do not have a date on it. But you will see an update to the Lowland Art + Building Tokens quite soon!

Building Tokens are going to be an alternative currency used for building and upgrading. The ways and rate at which you earn tokens is something we want to iterate on and experiment with, but expect them to be a tool that helps our newer highly engaged players to grow more quickly so you can play with them and they can be relevant and useful to clans quickly. This can be a tool to address the gap in player strength, we are still designing and implementing them but they will be coming soon (like really soon)!

In regards to allies: This is something we would like to get done soon, and are working through making the new addition fun (not just throwing a bunch of numbers into the mix), creating depth of strategy and gameplay, and making sure it is safe to be implemented (doesn’t negatively effect the economy).

Like all other comments in this section we will do our best to keep you updated, and if you have some questions please make a dedicated forum post and get a discussion going. We will monitor it and contribute on what we can.

Clan

Other than quality of life improvements, we aren’t working on clan features in the short term. We do however have a design for clan banks/tax/buildings/raids. But they are not currently in development.

Wars

This section contains all ideas submitted related to Wars and the War economy: new mith equipment/spells, random advantage type wars, more war types, war logs, war equipment, and more!

Our war system is quite robust and we are going to try and roll out some more war types for the next event and monitor that to determine how much focus we should be putting into this category while balancing the others. We’ll also be looking into the mith economy to keep it more relevant.

Overall Game Balance (Off System Wars)

This section contained pain points and ideas around OSWs and more player organized PVP.

We will not comment on which direction these ideas are going, in but the two ideas brought up by players that we want to tackle, were to reduce hit ranges, and limit the hide ally spell. We are discussing these internally and we encourage anyone who is interested to make a dedicated post to one (or each) of the ideas and have the discussion continue there.

Some things coming in the future: Similar to FarmFest, we are going to have more resources to help promote and organize things WITH you all! So if you have ideas of things you would like to have happen, or want some trophies and prizes (or punishments) set up we want to help empower you to do that! And like we keep saying, please make posts and let’s chat and get things spicy! In order to facilitate this we are going to be working more closely with players to create user generated content around PVP.

Quality of Life

This section has lots of pain points, and quicker to implement ideas related to how we all play the game! Things like health crystal usage display, old things in inventory, admin chat, KAW world clock, leaderboards, confirm ally hire button, and lots more!

Remember how we recently updated the rate of speaker generation? That was one of our most positively received ideas in a long time and in a similar vein are going to try and make it a priority to pick a few pain points and try and resolve them each week.

We have a big list of things and every week the developers and designers are picking a couple things to do, that have the highest impact return for time spent. Expect some things to be tackled soon and we'll update as we go along.

Abuse

We can’t say too much about bots without wrecking our investigation.

In the past we when examining instances of botting we’ve tracked players and looked at specific instances. We are going to continue this program and improve on it, but also we’re investing some time into monitoring bot activity at a macro level. The first set of data collection we’ve performed, suggests that it is far less prevalent than we expected, but we are still in early stages. Regardless we’ll keep you up to date where we can as we uncover more information.

Conclusion

We have taken the comments submitted to the KAW 2017 Community Wish List and grouped them into 7 categories:

Monthly ContentEconomyClanWarsOverall game balance (off system wars)Quality of LifeAbuse

Our discussions on this topic are governed around 2 main statements:

Underpromise and overdeliver

We have limited resources so we want to put them into things in a way that makes the biggest impact.

The important thing is that WE ARE PUTTING MORE RESOURCES BACK IN TO KAW.

No section has a specific road map, but timelines are hinted at and are subject to change.

We advise any and everyone to make dedicated posts to a specific topic to keep the discussion going on a focused matter!

Caveats:Please try and keep your feedback focused on our goal of improving the game in the context of limited resources and the reality that we'll never make everyone completely happy.

It would be impossible, or at the very least impractical, to come up with a rational and concise post that addressed every concern and suggestion. It's would also be impossible for us to come up with a post that, while perfectly rational and in good faith, is without some segment that, out of context, a forumer might transform into sensationalized absurdity. Don’t do that please.

Interesting read. I look forward to some of the things you've hinted at.

I have a couple questions. Is it necessary to introduce new lands and buildings? Wouldn't a new feature altogether be better? Or putting your resources in elsewhere? It seems you have a fair few ideas to consider and I think there are other areas of KaW that warrant improvement before this is considered. Bringing land tokens back is nice to see though.

And can we expect to see any clan based events? Or something to encourage working together as a clan? More so than the current event system allows. I understand your post said that's something you're not really working on atm. Can I ask why? Or is it something that will tie in with the new event system?

Agreed, Zorkay. I understand new lands are on the horizon sometime in the future. But I feel that lands are the devs 'go to' when something 'new' needs to be released. Not trying to be harsh, just my observation.

It sounds like they have acknowledged some of the issues in KaW which is good. I hope new lands aren't released before some of it is addressed. Or that it gets released just to throw all (if any) progress out the window.

Please to god STOP ADDING LANDS! That is killing the damn game you... ahhh. I swear you can't catch a hint!

More Lands and Builds have destroyed OSW and war and killed off new player desire to play the game! Everything you do will mean NOTHING if you keep adding land and builds.

Everything said sounds empty to me and I am only here because of friends. Endless additional land killed OSW. Strips mean nothing. Gold loss from pvp means nothing. You got rid of ally bombs and inflated this game so much you killed the war aspect (off system)

And your improvements will only hinder it more. Please under deliver with new lands.